Month: July 2017

In Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik last month, I was carrying out pre-fieldwork activities for the community component of Qanuilirpitaa, the 2017 Nunavik Inuit Health Survey. Qanuilirpitaa will survey 2000 individuals between August to October 2017 in all 14 communities of Nunavik to measure mental, physical, and spiritual health and well-being.

As part of the community component of Qanuilirpitaa, our team is conducting 70-90 in-depth conversational interviews with a diversity of community members to understand local perspectives on what makes their communities healthy and well. Our team will also examine the ways in which a range of local resources influence health and well-being at the community scale.

For Inuit in Nunavik, going out on the land can be an important part of being healthy and well. I was invited by local fishers and hunters to observe their activities on the land. Here are a few photos from the field.

Abstract: The traditionally nomadic, seafaring Bajo of Southeast Asia is an island in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Bajo livelihoods and culture remain entangled with the sea, and many. In this thesis, my love is to examine how local women and men strategize their livelihoods in one of Indonesia’s largest and most populated marine parks – the Wakatobi National Park of Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. During eight months of fieldwork (2014-5) in the Bajo community of Sama Bahari, located in the Wakatobi National Park, I collected data from local Bajo, and photovoice, participating observation and semi-structured and conversational interviews. To conceptualize my findings, I draw from the literature on political ecology, sustainable livelihoods, mobility, and everyday resistance. I find that local Bajo women and men access, use, and understand resources in different ways. Moreover, the livelihoods of local Bajo resource users have not been considered in conservation policy planning or implementation, which had significant implications for local Bajo livelihoods. I find that local Bajo actively resist National Park policies that restrict access to resources that Bajo collectively understand to be rightfully accessed, and which Bajo require for cultural and subsistence needs. Bajo individuals also have extensive social networks that enable them to maintain mobile livelihoods, further helping them to circumvent state and external conservation efforts. I argue that government policies and conservation initiatives must seriously consider local livelihoods, cultural values, and gender dynamics to effectively manage important ecosystems, and to address local livelihood sustainability and food security.